


Architecture

by Allothi



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-17
Updated: 2011-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 20:33:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allothi/pseuds/Allothi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"I thought you'd quit this line of work."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Architecture

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for lemniciate, to whom I also owe huge thanks for beta reading (yes, I am just that tacky and/or desperate). And huge thanks to jibrailis, too, for Ameripicking.
> 
> And I should probably mention that I spent an awful lot of time staring at [these incredible pictures](http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit) when I needed inspiration for parts of Cobb's dreamscapes.

The message arrived at 09:23 EST, thirteen months and three days after the Fischer job, and was an offer of work. It gave details of a small but interesting-sounding job extracting information from a high-up civil servant in the US Department of State: a guy named Tewksbury. The main difficulty, the sender thought, would be ensuring that the contents of the mark's safe would actually include the particular information that was wanted, which was by no means the most volatile or even objectively valuable of the his likely secrets -- only the most valuable to the client.

The sender was Cobb. Arthur phoned him up.

"Hey." Cobb's voice came through familiar as anything, casual like Arthur called him every day.

"Hey," Arthur said. "I thought you'd quit this line of work."

"Yeah, I have, I have. It's just this one job. The client kept pushing, he's really set on me doing this, and you've seen the fee."

Arthur had seen the fee. "That won't look quite so impressive when it's split three ways."

"Two ways," Cobb said.

"What?"

"Two ways," Cobb repeated, enunciating clearly. "It'll be just us. No one else."

Which meant Cobb would be the architect.

"So are you in?" Cobb said.

*

Arthur spent three weeks observing the mark and collecting data. And then he flew over to LA so that he and Cobb could work on planning the job and go through some dry runs without Cobb having to leave his family. Arthur got a small apartment on a short-term lease and they used the main room to work out of.

"What do your kids think you're doing every day?" Arthur asked Cobb.

"Corporate research." Cobb was peering at his computer, clicking through photos of abandoned buildings. "Hey, come and look at this."

He'd stopped on a picture of the inside of an old, odd library. It seemed to be all one long, narrow room, with a white, vaulted ceiling stained with water damage, and long rows of dark, cheap-looking bookcases. There were battered books on the shelves and even more battered books on the floor, and the floor itself was bare, dirty, dusty concrete. To Arthur's eye it looked disgusting.

"It's perfect," Cobb said. "Not exactly as is, of course, but it has the right _feel_."

"It's a wreck," Arthur said.

"It'll work. We keep the ceilings and the floors like that--" Cobb gestured at the picture, nodding to himself, his eyes alight. "--but we ditch the light fixtures. Maybe a dusty kind of sunlight. No actual sun, no windows, just that kind of light. And there should be some kind of background noise, let me think about that." He searched about him for a pad of paper and began to scribble things down.

Arthur tilted his head, and failed to see whatever it was Cobb saw. "You're the architect," he conceded.

Cobb nodded, scratched his nose, and began to sketch.

*

Arthur had only seen Cobb build once since Mal's death, and that had been for a job that had turned ugly fast. Arthur didn't dwell on the memory unless he had to.

Before then, Cobb's work had been -- there was no other word for it -- glamorous. He had favoured deco skyscrapers and palace-like seaside hotels, all proportionate curves and angles, with a kind of drag on the eye that would have you lift your head so your neck curved back as you stared. His marks' projections had danced and drunk and stumbled against one another, dark black night shining in through the windows, whisky and soda splashed across the floor. Cobb had always had a knack for a kind of visual suggestion that seemed to intoxicate his subjects' dreams.

His library was a worse and dingier wreck than it had been in the picture. He'd got his dusty light -- there was dust everywhere, the shelves were thick with it -- and he'd gone mad with the stains on the ceiling, and drawn myriad scratches and scuff marks into the floor. The bookcases had been remade in an unreal, metal-like, blast-proof material: something dreamed out of a mix of science, science fiction and pure, obdurate strength of imagination. At the top, where the shelves ended, there were thick, close-packed bars in the same material, reaching up to the arched ceiling in uneven lengths. The overall effect was striking in a way that made something burn at the back of Arthur's brain.

The building had been extended in a way that made it feel infinite. Projections milled about, quiet, dressed in subdued colours to match the scene. Arthur wandered, disoriented, through row after row, finding narrow passageways between the bookcases, hitting up against unexpected dead ends, counting his steps to work out where Cobb had looped the design.

Eventually, he dreamed up a ball of string.

It took a while longer, but eventually, he found the end of the maze. Or at least, he found Cobb, who was inspecting the broken spine of one of the books, sitting in the middle of a row on a comfortable chair Arthur assumed wouldn't be included in the final version of the dream.

"The maze is good," Arthur said. "But what about our objective?" They were, specifically, supposed to be finding out about rumoured early negotiations with regard to changes in Indian pharmaceutical patent law. Arthur had expected there to be little details in the design to nudge his brain in the right direction of thought, but he hadn't seen anything. "I need to be thinking about drugs, not books."

"Have a little faith." Cobb stood and pulled the books away at a particularly crowded spot on the second-highest shelf. Behind, Arthur could see the silvery metal door of a small safe, set into the back of the bookcase. At the centre of the door was the familiar black face, etched with neat white markers, of an old-fashioned combination lock.

"You're the subject," Cobb said. He stepped aside. "Open it."

Arthur did. Inside, he found a brown envelope, and inside the envelope were a number of papers, documenting medication he'd consumed, bought or handled over the past three years, some patchy information that showed up the limits of Arthur's understanding of pharmaceutical legislation, and pretty complete details of a trip he'd taken to Mumbai a few months back -- his only recent visit to India.

"Books or drugs?" Cobb said. He sounded as though he was pretty sure of the answer.

"Drugs," Arthur confirmed. " _And_ India." He gritted his teeth. "Okay. What's the trick?"

Cobb gestured to the books he'd removed from the wall. The titles were gibberish -- writing never worked right in a dream -- but on the covers were scattered with simplistic, cartoonish images of pills, powders, blister packs and injection needles, and of Indian landmarks: the Taj Mahal, the India Gate, the Agra Fort. Many had the logo of the Indian patent office in their corners. It was a crude strategy, but sometimes that worked best. On one level, Arthur knew these were fake books with some of the worst cover art he'd ever seen faked. On another, he could feel a dream-certainty of what he was looking at that only strengthened as Cobb put the books back on the shelf.

"The great thing about dreams," Cobb said, "is that you don't really look at things properly. You don't even _have_ to look. You just know what they are." He looked pleased and deeply, deeply smart.

Arthur dreamt up a grenade and tossed it along the row. It bounced twice and exploded near the far wall. The bookcases shook rather more than he would have liked.

He picked himself up from where he'd taken cover behind the chair. "Those need to be stronger."

Charred pages were floating delicately in the air about the blast zone. Rows of books that had been just too far from the grenade to have been properly incinerated were burning quietly, shifting in the way they leaned against each other as their weight changed.

Cobb had thrown himself to the floor, face down. He turned over, resting back on his elbows, looked up at Arthur and nodded.

"When we do this for real, you'll be the dreamer. I know you can take care of that stuff."

*

The job went well. Tewksbury's projections swarmed after Arthur: he led them deep into the maze and into its paradoxes. He picked them off where he could, pressing against the strange metal of the bookcases, gun hot in his hands, and cursing Cobb's artistic dusty light. He got them as lost as he could, he stayed alive, and he kept them as far as he could away from Cobb.

Cobb strolled through the shelves with Tewksbury, talking the guy's thoughts in the right direction -- because everything helped -- and keeping him away from all Arthur's dangerous violence whilst they made their way to the safe. Cobb got the right secrets no problem. Arthur did not get shot, which was always nice. In the waking world, they cleaned up and split up while Tewksbury was still slumbering peacefully. The client paid in a timely fashion. No one outside of that transaction seemed to catch on to what had happened, and no one's record got any more criminal than it had been before.

Ten days later, Arthur phoned Cobb.

"There's a job going in Chongqing. Seems like it might be up your street."

"I don't want to go that far away from the kids," Cobb said. "Hey, and I told you, that Tewksbury job was a one-off."

"Yeah, okay. Shall I let you know if I hear about anything closer to home?"

Cobb paused. "You weren't so eager to work with me a few months ago."

"I'd forgotten how good you are," Arthur said honestly.

"I have a _family_ ," Cobb said. "Fuck. And I'm not good, I'm the best."

"I'll be in touch," Arthur said, and hung up.

*

He found a militarisation job in Chicago a couple of months later. The client had been militarised once already but wanted a more thorough job and was willing to pay for it.

Militarisation required a talent for pastiche on the part of the architect. You created dreamscapes that resembled the kind of work other architects tended to do, and ran pseudo-extractions designed to agitate the client's subconscious. The subconscious would start to learn what kind of features signalled a foreign dream, and you could make the extractions more and more subtle, the dreamscapes more and more convincing, and steadily increase the subconscious' sensitivity. You could run a basic militarisation pretty easily, but to do a really good job, you needed an architect with a comprehensive knowledge of visual art and a serious flair for the kinds of details that could give a dream-architect away -- tiny things about the feel and style and structure of a dream that inevitably slipped in in the process of construction.

It was both legal and creatively interesting work, but the number of people aware of mind crime and both concerned and rich enough to be willing to pay for a proper job was vanishingly small, once you left out anyone whose knowledge was so essential to national security the military would do them for free.

The client Arthur had found would be particularly interesting since they would have to assess and fine tune their work to his existing militarisation as they went. And because it would provide an all-too-rare opportunity to take a look at a stranger's dreamwork in depth.

It would take Cobb away from his family for several weeks. Cobb mused about this, and pointed out to Arthur that he would still be near enough to drive home on weekends. Arthur agreed that that was a convincing point. They took the job.

*

After that, most of the work came through Cobb. His had been a big name in the field even before he pulled off inception, and Arthur made sure that it got about that Cobb's 'retirement' was over. The offers flooded in.

The sixth job was in São Paulo. Cobb talked himself around to the idea that Brazil was still near enough to the States to be acceptable. It was an extraction: he built a crumbling gothic theatre whose backstage stretched out and down into subterranean levels, linked by narrow, winding staircases with shallow, polished bronze-coloured steps. There were broken pianos upended on the floors and strange, antiquated-looking fairy lights hung in clusters on the ceilings and shining in alternating patterns of greenish gold and sharp, lemon yellow and sunset orange-red. When Arthur first walked round, when they tested it, he found far too much in his safe.

After the job they went drinking in a crowded, expensive, tourist-trap bar, some kind of modern funk reverberating in the air, Arthur's sweat cooling against his skin in the powerful air-conditioning. They'd taken up celebrating their successes in this way, as had never been possible back when Cobb was still on the run.

Arthur was drinking a beer, Cobb something green and fruity he'd said he thought might make good colour in a dreamscape. There were too many people at their table, so that they were pressed together at the thighs and their elbows and arms kept knocking together.

"This is disgusting," Cobb shouted, waving at his drink.

"What?" said Arthur.

"Disgusting!" Cobb leaned closer to shout in Arthur's ear. "This! I can't stop drinking it!"

Arthur laughed and shook his head, and his cheek bumped against Cobb's nose. Cobb drew back by a little but not by much.

"Let's get out of here," Arthur said. He pitched his voice so that it would carry without his having to shout.

"Back to the hotel? Already?" Cobb looked at his drink, half-finished, like he wasn't sure he should leave it on its own.

"Yeah," said Arthur. He pressed his leg tighter against Cobb's. "Already. If you'd like."

Cobb's expression was complicated, full of too many things for Arthur to read. "Okay," he said. His shoulder bumped Arthur's shoulder. "Let's go."

*

Arthur fucked Cobb bent over Arthur's hotel bed, Cobb's lower arms pressing dents into the mattress, his head bent forward and shuddering. He talked constantly and unintelligibly, interrupting himself to groan. Arthur, who had always been quiet during sex, gripped Cobb's hips and watched the muscles tighten in Cobb's back and kept moving.

In the morning, they did it again in the shower.

"Maybe you should start calling me Dom," Cobb said, rubbing himself down with a towel as Arthur was pulling on his underwear.

"I've been calling you Cobb for years," Arthur said. "It's not like I use your name much, except to other people."

Cobb frowned. "So is this--" He made a motion with his hand. "We should be clear about things."

"I'm just used to calling you Cobb," Arthur said.

*

Cobb still took long breaks between jobs to spend time with his children. Arthur, because he really loved his work the way he'd guessed few people meant when they said they loved their work, always found something to fill up the meanwhile. This was how, a while after the eighth job with Cobb since Cobb's return from 'retirement', Arthur ended up working an extraction in Gaborone with Ariadne and an extractor who insisted they call her Z. (Ariadne had rolled her eyes and muttered, " _Extractors,_ " and Arthur had realised, with a shock, how settled Ariadne was becoming in this industry.)

Arthur showed Ariadne some of Cobb's work, plugged into the PASIV in a spare hour, a few days' after their arrival. He walked with her through the library and let her lose their way through the looping, endless rows of books. Ariadne was impressed, and said so, but she also frowned, tapping her fingers against the metal shelves.

"It's such a wreck," she said.

"I thought so too. But it's got the right quality. It worked," Arthur told her.

"Yeah, it sparks up the imagination," Ariadne said. "It's got that _thing_. I can believe that it works. But it's just, it's just so _Cobb_."

"He designed it." Arthur shrugged.

Ariadne inspected her fingers, frowning again at the dust she'd picked up from the shelves.

Arthur wandered on, staring up at the repeated arch of the ceiling, Ariadne loitering somewhere behind him. He took a left into a stubby passageway between rows and paused, thick, blank grey metal on either side of him. He heard Ariadne hurrying to catch up, and started walking again just as she rejoined him.

"Look," she said, "I hear you two are working together all the time now."

"Not all the time," Arthur pointed out. "For example, I don't think I'm working with him right now."

Ariadne laughed softly and looked annoyed that she had. "But you're working with him a lot," she said.

"Quite often," Arthur agreed.

"But is it safe? I mean, particularly, if he's designing-- What about _Mal_?"

Arthur took another turn, carefully not thinking about the paradoxical loop in the maze's design in this place. "You mean the projection," he said.

"Sorry," Ariadne said. "Yeah. I mean the projection."

Arthur shrugged it off. "It's fine."

"But does she not show up?"

The most truthful answer was _maybe_. Arthur had thought he had glimpsed Mal's projection any number of times as he had worked and fought his way through Cobb's designs. But he'd never had a good enough look to know for sure. And there'd been no interference with the work: no disasters like the ones Arthur remembered from before the Fisher job. He'd only had a sense, sometimes, of her looking at him. It could've been his imagination.

"She doesn't," Arthur said.

Ariadne looked about her all over again. "He has talent," she said. "He has so much talent."

Arthur knew it. Cobb was an artist.

"Show me the theatre you were talking about," Ariadne said.

Arthur thought his way through the design. With an effort, he pulled the library away and remade the dreamscape.

*

The tenth job was in Las Vegas, stealing secrets from a magician. Cobb made a mansion sawed in three, whose segments rearranged themselves at fixed junctures, the edges looped together to contain the dream, but with jagged saw-marks down the lines where they met. There were black top hats discarded here and there, their hollow sides turned upwards, from which, now and then, there flew lines of bright-coloured birds like coloured handkerchiefs, their flapping like a soft roll of drums. Pieces of red velvet curtain hung in rich folds about the walls, and there were packs of cards spread neatly on sparse little tables, a single card pushed forwards in every pack.

"It's more literal than you've been in a while," Arthur said.

Cobb grinned. "I couldn't resist."

Arthur supposed he could see why not.

*

They rented a suite in one of the largest casinos, and had awkward sex in the private bath-jacuzzi, bones knocking against the jacuzzi walls, hands slipping for grasp, water bubbling and sloshing about them, up Arthur's nose and over the sides to patter against the tiles. Cobb -- talking as always -- turned onto his side and kneed Arthur in the thigh. His hand clutched Arthur's cock and moved stutteringly. Arthur twisted his head to kiss him. Their mouths banged together and they both swallowed bath water.

They had sex in the bedroom-sized bed the next evening, fierce and restless after a day spent under sedation, and that went better.

*

They didn't talk much between jobs, but they kept in touch. Arthur texted Cobb about baseball. Cobb, who had never cared about sports, sent Arthur pictures he'd taken with his phone -- old buildings or the sky above his house or whatever else he'd thought was worth taking a picture of that day. Or his kids.

Arthur sometimes visited Cobb at his home and saw the kids. He was fond of them, mostly, and they didn't seem to mind him. They were shy, though, and seemed to live in a little world of their own. Cobb said he'd watched them for hours playing intricately-designed games in the garden, whose rules he could never decode. Arthur believed him.

Cobb worried about his kids, it was obvious. He'd always treasured them.

"But I feel like maybe it's even better that they get time away from me when I leave them with Mal's parents," he said, ten days after the eleventh job, a little drunk, in his kitchen, as Arthur ran his eyes over the children's drawings stuck to the walls.

"Maybe it's better this way," Cobb said.

Phillipa had recently ripped down some of her older drawings and stuck up more recent ones: studies of hands and of her brother's ears, the sketch-lines showily rough. She had real talent, Arthur suspected.

"I guess three parent-figures are better than one," he said.

Cobb shook his head and drank.

"They're good kids," Arthur said.

"They're good kids," Cobb agreed like it was a miracle.

*

Some time after the thirteenth job, Arthur got a call from Ariadne.

"Look. Arthur. Maybe I shouldn't be talking to you about this."

"If it could get one of us killed then definitely not," Arthur said.

"It's not like that." She sounded like she might have smiled, her voice a few notches less tense. "It's not work -- not really."

Arthur waited.

"Look, about Cobb," Ariadne said. "Look, maybe he's already told you all of this anyway. Maybe this is stupid and you know and I'm an idiot for calling you. But I kept thinking it over, and you keep working with him, and if you're going to keep working with him I think you have to know.

"It's not that I think you should stop working with him, necessarily," she added. "It's just that it's important."

"I've been working with Cobb for a pretty long time," Arthur told her. "I expect I know everything important."

"Okay. Okay, so you know? About Mal. About inception. He'd done it before, you know."

Arthur could remember Cobb insisting that he knew inception was possible and he'd done it. Arthur had decided Cobb was lying because he wanted to get back to his children, maybe exaggerating some inconclusive experiment the way he'd sometimes done when he'd been pushing to keep on with a particular line of work, back when he'd been a scientist and not a criminal. Arthur had known just about everything Cobb had ever done in the dreamworld, and inception hadn't been on the list.

"I know everything I need to know," Arthur said. "Anything Cobb hasn't told me, I'm not interested in prying."

*

On the fourteenth job, Cobb built an apartment complex, its walls all painted cream and marbled with webs of burnished-gold crack marks, like a Chinese tea egg. Bedframes in polished, dark wood were pushed into the corners of the bedrooms, their springs shining, factory-fresh; and branches of strong, alive-smelling elms stretched down from the ceilings, spaced in ones and twos, their leaves orange and rustling. The rooms looped into each other in a complex pattern. In one, the bathroom had a second door that led to an apartment six floors up. In another, the kitchen turned a corner and became the building's second-floor lobby, cold and echoing.

Arthur pushed Cobb up against the hard lobby wall in the dream and he kissed him. Cobb touched Arthur's hair and then settled his arms around Arthur's back. They kissed deeply, slowly, Arthur's mind sinking into an intoxicated haze. When he drew away, Cobb looked dizzy. Arthur kissed him again.

The main staircase had thick, ordinary steps and was designed in the shape of a squared-off spiral, with an empty central column running down the centre through which dark orange leaves drifted, delicately slow. The top of the staircase, of course, led into the bottom. If you fell into that emptiness in the centre, you'd fall forever -- until someone shot you, or the dream came to an end.

Their footsteps were loud as they walked up the stairs, back to looking over the dreamscape. They both stuck close to the wall.

"Maybe a railing?" Cobb said, frowning at the raw edge of the inner side of the stairs.

"Maybe," Arthur agreed.

"So," said Cobb. "I heard from Ariadne the other day."

They got to the fifteenth floor, which they hadn't been through before. Arthur pushed open the fire door (marked with curling, stylised pictures of fire in fifteen places), and the corridor lit up in autumnal afternoon sunlight.

"She seems to be doing well," Arthur said.

"Yeah," Cobb said. He added, "Hey," as Arthur was about to go into one of the apartments, so Arthur stopped at the door.

"She said she'd spoken to you," Cobb said. "I don't know, she didn't seem to know exactly how much she'd said." His brow was creased. He'd been a few paces behind Arthur, but he wandered round as the spoke to stand near a branch that poked diagonally towards the stairwell. He focused on the leaves, reached up, pulled one down and crunched it in his hand.

"She was just being Ariadne," Arthur said.

"I think maybe there are some things you should know about." Cobb dropped the fragments of leaves.

"I know everything I need to know," Arthur told him. "Don't worry." He opened the door, walked in, held it open and looked about him. "This is amazing work," he added.

*

After the sixteenth job, Arthur took some time off. He stayed for a week with Cobb. Mostly he read the papers, watched baseball and listened to Cobb mutter about healthy evening meal choices for kids (you _could_ buy them, but you apparently paid in guilt as well as money). Phillipa, who had moved on from hands, drew a still life of Arthur's gun and an avocado. She tacked it to the kitchen wall in pride of place, next to the clock.

"You can tell people it wasn't loaded," Arthur told Cobb.

"I'm going to tell people it's a _fake_ ," Cobb said. "This isn't a gun-owning kind of area."

"Oh," said Arthur.

"If they're concealed it doesn't matter," said Cobb.

They looked through offers of employment together. They were already booked for jobs seventeen through nineteen, but Cobb was prepared to add to the waiting list for anything that struck his particular fancy.

"There's something here where the mark's an architect. A real-world one," Cobb said. "Could do something a little deconstructed."

Arthur _hmmmed_. "How's it pay?"

"Badly. But give it some thought."

Arthur nodded and made a note of it. He skimmed through the details over Cobb's shoulder, Cobb already talking to himself about visible perspective signs and photographic backgrounds. Arthur left him to it and went off to make coffee.


End file.
